I suppose the best way to look at this is simply never to say never.
Most of us have lists of things in our mind that we want to do before we die and things we would never do if we lived a thousand years.
One thing I never particularly wanted to do was take a cruise, and while some of the European river cruises or the Mississippi steamboat cruises have seemed interesting, I never had any inkling to go on the massive, hotel-style ships that sail the seas.
Oh, well.
You give some, you get some.
If there has been one major disappointment the last few years, it’s that we don’t celebrate Christmas anymore. This December will be our 14th in Georgia, and we have had a tree up exactly once. We’re retired and our family has been spread all over the world.We made a couple of trips to visit Pauline and her family in Jamaica and Guatemala, but that’s pretty much it.
This year will be different. We’ll spend Christmas week with Pauline, her husband Johnathan and their combined six children — on one of those big hotel-ship cruises. We’ll go from Miami to Jamaica to Haiti to the Bahamas and then back to Miami, leaving Florida on the 22nd and returning on the 29th.
It will be the fourth Christmas Day of 74 I’ll have spent outside the country — 1976 in Vienna, 1977 in London, four or five years ago in Guatemala and 2023 in … wait for it … Haiti.
Actually being in Haiti is sort of weird. The part of the island we’re visiting was a created as a stopping point for cruise ships, walled off from the rest of the country.
Mostly just tourist stuff.
The ship itself is huge. It’s the third largest of Royal Caribbean’s fleet, with 2,801 staterooms and a capacilty of 5,602. Compare that to the Titanic.
The biggest ship ever cost $7.5 million dollars to build in 1912, equivalent of about $200 million today.
Oasis of the Seas cost $1.24 billion.
Look at the interior and it’s different that anything folks in the Titantc era could have imagined.
It looks like fun, but the best part of it won’t be cruising. The best part of it will be spending time with eight people I see far too little of — Pauline, Johnathan, Artemis, Lexington, Albanie, Malachi, Simon and Coen — and one I have loved dearly for 31 years — Nicole.
It should be a great Christmas.